Join the Second Annual Reverse Trick-or-Treating, Promote Fair Trade!

On Halloween night, do your part to spread the word about the need for fair trade by reversing the Halloween tradition.

Through Reverse Trick-or-Treating, your children and local group(s) will hand out samples of fair trade chocolate to candy-givers, as they go house to house on Halloween night. Each piece of fair trade chocolate they give out will be accompanied by a card that describes the social and environmental costs of corporate chocolate and how buying fair trade chocolate is a meaningful alternative.

Last year, Reverse Trick-or-Treaters brought fair trade chocolate to the doorsteps of over 72,000 houses in the United States and Canada. Parents raved about how Reverse Trick-or-Treating transformed Halloween into a meaningful event, when children could give back to their neighbors and cocoa-growing communities.

Learn more from our friends at Global Exchange, including how to order a FREE Reverse Trick-or-Treating kit.

Reverse Trick-or-Treating, an initiative of Global Exchange, with leadership from Equal Exchange, is a collaborative effort of countless children, youth, and adults supported by nonprofit organizations such as UUSC, Americans for Informed Democracy, Coop America, International Labor Rights Forum, Slow Food, and others.

How to Sign Up for Reverse Trick-or-Treating

All that you, your congregation, youth group, social justice committee, or school need to participate is a FREE Reverse Trick-or-Treating kit. Kits are FREE thanks to the generous donations of fair trade chocolate companies Equal Exchange, Alter Eco, Theo Chocolates, and La Siembra (in Canada). Participants pay just the cost of postage.

Deadline to Request Kits:
Groups -- October 1
Individuals -- October 13

Looking for fair trade Halloween candy to distribute to kids at your door?

Visit store.gxonlinestore.org or UUSC's fair trade partner Equal Exchange.

Last Halloween, the message of fair trade was amplified by dozens of print, internet, blog, radio, and television media reports about Reverse Trick-or-Treating. If you are interested in helping to get the word out through media coverage of your Reverse Trick-or-Treating experience, contact UUSC's Media Coordinator Dick Campbell.

Did you know?

"If we do not start educating our youth about the connections of social activism, economic justice, and the day-to-day decisions they make in life (even the candy bar they buy at the corner store), then how can we ever expect to transform our world?" - Elizabeth Lain Schell, DRE First Unitarian Congregational Society of Brooklyn

• Despite years of promises from the major chocolate manufacturers, little has been done to tackle the documented problem of forced child labor on many farms that supply cocoa.
• U.S. consumers eat 2.8 billion pounds of chocolate annually, nearly half of the world's supply.
• The market value of the current annual cocoa crop is $5.1 billion.
• The International Institute for Tropical Agriculture for USAID has estimated that 284,000 children work in abusive child labor conditions on cocoa farms in West Africa, the world's largest cocoa producer, and that 64% of those children are under 14 years old.
• There is no other time of year in the United States when more chocolate is consumed by children than around Halloween.

Read about how UUSC promotes fair trade.

Read about the UUSC Coffee Project.

Read about a blog about a UUSC JustWorks camp on fair trade.

Read an article about last year's efforts.

Learn more about forced child labor in the cocoa industry from our allies Global Exchange, Equal Exchange, and the International Labor Rights Forum.

 

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